READER’S CORNER: Idling-ambulance issue worsens

Delays in offloading patients is still a problem 10 years later. (RYAN TAPLIN)

You’ve got to love the Nova Scotia paramedics. Their union takes their five minutes of time in the news cycle, not to talk about any of their own legitimate grievances, but to bring attention to the issue of offload delay at hospitals.

This is a public policy issue. Just as patients arriving at emergency under their own steam might have to wait to be seen by a doctor, very frequently patients arriving at hospital by ambulance must wait. The hospital forces the two paramedics to wait with them, by refusing to take responsibility for the patient. The ambulance then sits empty, useless to anyone else. To be clear, this is not a paramedic labour issue. The paramedics get paid the exact same if they stand around waiting in the hospital or if they are back in service helping the next patient.

If they don’t get back in service, a new problem is created: delayed response. Because there is fluid deployment of ambulances across the whole province, ambulances are constantly moving to fill the holes in coverage. If 10 ambulances are backed up at the QE II, a delayed response could happen in Halifax, but it could just as easily happen in Yarmouth, Truro or Sydney. The whole province is counting on those ambulances to be available to handle the total call volume.

After the paramedics’ union had its say on the news, their boss, Jeff Fraser, the director of operations for the private company that Nova Scotia contracts to operate the ambulance service, weighed in. He downplayed the problem, pointing to the fact that fluid deployment mitigates the concern — which is true, but he was less than candid.

On his online resume, one of his accomplishments was to help set up a committee to resolve this problem, a committee he sits on to this day. The problem is the committee was set up a decade ago. The committee should have been ad hoc. The problem needs to be fixed, not managed.

Last fall, at a Cape Breton paramedics conference, I got up and asked two members of the Nova Scotia health authority who were on a discussion panel, along with Dr. Andrew Travers, who is an ER doctor at QEII, when the problem of offload delay might be resolved. To the amazement of Dr. Travers and myself, the answer was, “What problem?” They weren’t even aware of it.

Working as a paramedic, two-and-a-half hours away from the QEII and an hour from any regional hospital, I keep a personal record of the calls I respond to. In the first six weeks of this year, 50 per cent of the calls I have responded to were to help a patient. The other 50 per cent was to provide coverage for communities other than my own. This is a pretty strong statistic suggesting that the problem is getting worse.